Actually Getting There Is Only Half the Battle
July 14, 2010
The next time you go to the University of Southern California campus at five in the morning, check some of the cars in the parking lot. Chances are that one of them, maybe more, will have a struggling student sleeping inside.
This is the story for a few students who have transferred from community colleges to four-year schools. It's an extreme version of the story but not an unrepresentative one. They sometimes sleep in their cars, not because they can't afford to stay on campus—even though some of them can't—but because they did not have a mentor or a network to guide them through on-campus housing selections once they successfully transferred.
Moreover, since they were once a community college student, there's a 20 percent chance that they spend anywhere from six to twenty hours per week commuting to and from classes. What's the point in driving an hour, two hours or three hours home when you have class at 8 AM?
Here's a long overdue idea: education bonds anchored to a person's salary after college. If you finance your education with such a bond, you'd owe a percentage of income—say, 15%. This would be MARKEDLY less of an indentured servitude than the current system of lending and borrowing, yet would allow borrowers to make decisions early that favor public service and/or that create great work experiences.
Shane F. Hockins
As higher education costs grow, students are adopting new strategies to afford education. One strategy is to go to a community college for one to two years and then transfer to a four-year institution for the last two to three years. Seems simple enough: you still get the credits, you save money and you get a degree from that four-year school, which looks great on a résumé. But what actually happens after these students transfer? They are now in a system with no network of friends, no acquaintances or any professional training on how to get a job after graduation.
There are more than 1,100 community colleges in the United States. As of the fall of 2007, community college students accounted for 46 percent of all US undergraduates, according to the American Association of Community Colleges. Yet, as Laura Fitzpatrick noted in an article for Time magazine last year, "federal funding has held